A Sibling Rivalry Worth Jumping Into

Restaurant Review: Hog & Hominy in Memphis

Hog & Hominy in Memphis includes a bocce court and a back-porch bar. Across the street is Andrew Michael Italian Kitchen, its “older brother.”Credit
Lance Murphey for The New York Times

MEMPHIS — If I ate more at Hog & Hominy than was necessary from a strictly nutritional point of view, it was not my server’s fault.

She was kind and patient as she delivered the explanatory lecture that begins so many restaurant meals these days. The cooking, she said, reflected the Italian families and Southern childhoods of the two chefs who opened Hog & Hominy last year, Michael Hudman and Andrew Ticer. Many ingredients, including the pork whose leading role on the menu was foretold by the restaurant’s name, came from farms within 200 miles of Memphis. The plates were small and meant to be shared, but one pizza plus two other dishes would be plenty for me and my guest, she said.

At first we simply padded out her suggestion with two more dishes. Thirty minutes later, we augmented that with three more items. By dessert, when we each put away an entire slice of pie, it appeared that either we couldn’t do simple math or didn’t know how to listen.

She meant no harm, but we had other ideas. If we’d taken her advice I might have missed the way plump hominy kernels rounded out the smoky bacon, smokier ’nduja and the pepper vinegar in a bowl of long-cooked collard greens. I wouldn’t have known that a melting scoop of extra-sharp pimento cheese could make a strangely wonderful sauce for grilled asparagus with bits of chopped preserved lemon.

I wouldn’t be sitting here now daydreaming about Hog & Hominy’s fryer rabbit, dredged twice in buttermilk and flour and deep-fried. The meat dripped with juices that had an undercurrent of spice and a citrus bite imparted by a brine made with sour oranges and Calabrian chiles.

I might have left Memphis without knowing the blissful burn of Hog & Hominy’s fried sweetbreads. They were bathed in a crunchy rust-colored hot sauce made from deeply roasted peanuts puréed with balsamic and honey vinegars, lime juice, roasted garlic and a pile of chile peppers. Like Nashville’s hot chicken, these sweetbreads were more fiery with every bite. Seeking relief, I turned to the white aioli splashed on the plate. It didn’t cool things down at all. There was jalapeño in that aioli. It was a lowdown, sneaky move, and I admired Mr. Hudman and Mr. Ticer immensely for it.

The two men bonded in sixth grade while guarding each other on the basketball court. Talking outside the gym, Mr. Hudman said, each realized for the first time that he was not the only boy in Memphis who spent “crazy Italian Sundays” at his grandmother’s house eating pasta with what each was convinced had to be the world’s best sauce.

By the time they were out of college they were cooking together in a “turn and burn” Italian restaurant while dreaming of their own place. It would be grand. Its centerpiece would be a long, white-neon bar shaped like Italy.

The pair traveled to Italy, killing and butchering a pig together and learning how to adapt their cooking to each week’s new ingredients. “Our whole outlook changed immediately,” Mr. Hudman said.

So did their taste in restaurant design, apparently, because when they got back home, they signed a lease on a converted East Memphis ranch house and outfitted its series of dining rooms with painted-wood fireplace mantels, small wrought-iron wall sconces and curtains in natural linen. They would let the ingredients speak the way they had heard them speak in Italy, but they would also let the South get in a word or two. They called it Andrew Michael Italian Kitchen.

(The house has a history. Raji Jallepalli-Reiss, who would later become the first executive chef of Tamarind on East 22nd Street in Manhattan, opened Restaurant Raji here, winning national fame for her modern and influential Indian cuisine. She died in 2002.)

Andrew Michael Italian Kitchen, which opened in 2008, is the dutiful and responsible first born. Hog & Hominy, which they built in another ranch house across the street four years later, is the scrappy younger sibling who stays up later, keeps rowdier company and gets away with things the older brother can’t. Reservations are not taken. There is a bocce court on one side of the building and a porch out back that turns into a dive bar on weekends, serving things like boiled peanuts from a crockpot and an Oklahoma City-style cheeseburger smashed on a griddle.

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This may be partly due to the small-plates form, which, like Twitter, can impose discipline through arbitrary space limitations. Some main courses at Andrew Michael seemed to sprawl with garnishes as if to fill the available surface area. Certain appetizers felt slack, too, though not the AM Breakfast, a delicious refinement on a Southern morning meal with cured pork belly, a slow-cooked egg, creamy grits and fried pork skins pulled from the oil so recently, they were still popping.

But a bird’s nest of fried spaghetti was laden with a redundant starch, smoked potatoes, and a protein that felt starchy, octopus; under it all was a puddle of sea urchin, which was rich enough without the addition of cured egg yolk.

The kitchen at Hog & Hominy can trip itself up, too. House-made boudin disappeared in the melted fontina and scrambled egg of a pizza called the Prewitt. A dry and crumbly chicken tamale needed either more lard in the masa or a long bath in spicy tomato sauce, Mississippi Delta style.

But most dishes knew exactly what they were about, none more so than the beef and Cheddar hot dog. One day Mr. Ticer was talking to the head charcutier for both restaurants, Aaron Winters, about being a kid, and splitting a hot dog down the middle, and arranging cheese in the crease, and then blasting it in the microwave until it puffed up and bubbled.

“I got you,” Mr. Winters said, and went off to grind spiced beef with Cheddar. The dog comes on a fresh, hot pretzel bun with yellow mustard, and it’s as good an example as you’ll find of an American restaurant vastly improving something lowbrow without falling into the trap of making it highbrow.

What I liked best of all, though, was the pie. I suppose I should say “pies” because I ate three different slices before I left town.

One was a banana pudding variation with a Nilla wafer crust and whipped cream on top. Mysteriously, and magnificently, a half-inch of peanut butter blended with mascarpone had inserted itself just below the whipped cream. Another, called Carol’s Delightful Smile, set a filling of malted chocolate pudding on a black foundation of pulverized Oreos. The top was showered with crushed Whoppers.

“I think Carol was smiling because she was stoned,” my guest said. (According to Mr. Hudman, Carol is a line cook at Andrew Michael whose last name is Johnson, and she comes by her smile naturally.)

The third pie, on a hazelnut crust, has a profoundly purple filling of blueberry curd spread with orange marmalade. It is called the Beauregarde, after the Roald Dahl character who turned into a blueberry. It is as appealing as Violet was obnoxious.

The three pies had been fancied up a little, as things that pass through the mind of a chef tend to be, but they all retained the sense of fun that is at the heart of pie-ness. This is what I liked best about Hog & Hominy, too: Mr. Hudman and Mr. Ticer aren’t always trying to make a grand statement about Southern or Italian food. With their second place, they have given themselves permission to play. As you’d expect of two former kids who spent a lot of time throwing a ball around, they’re very good at it.